


The Tea Party

by Yung_Mofftiss (OnWednesdaysWeStudyinPink)



Category: Fringe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-15
Updated: 2009-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-14 22:48:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/842247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnWednesdaysWeStudyinPink/pseuds/Yung_Mofftiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternate Chapter 6 to “Growing Up in the Dark” by Fantasy Cat. Characters borrowed with permission! Prompt: Poisoning (accidental)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tea Party

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Growing Up in the Dark](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/23230) by Fantasy Cat. 



“Hey. Are you guys awake?”

Astrid’s head was only visible from the nose up as she looked into the attic, her eyes adjusting slowly to the dark. Emerging slowly from behind a few stacked boxes came Olivia and Peter, her two friends. She smiled and even though they couldn’t see it, she knew they certainly felt it. They gave timid smiles in return, drifting towards her like small moths to a flame.

“C’mon. My mama is taking a nap because she doesn’t feel well. Did you guys finish your breakfast?”

Her two friends began to quietly come down the ladder after her, the little blonde girl’s skinny limbs looking even thinner in Astrid’s clothes, while Charlie’s hand-me-downs looks perfectly fine on the green eyed boy.

“Yes. The egg sandwiches were good,” Olivia said, sparing Astrid a weak smile.

Astrid felt proud as they joined her on the wooden hallway floor and helped her put the ladder and trapdoor away. “My daddy made extra. I told him I would want them for snacks.”

“Who eats an egg sandwich for a snack?” Stink asked in his usual irritated tone.

Astrid chose to ignore him, instead linking her arm with the other young girl’s. “Do you want to take a bath, Olivia? I have some pretty smelling soap with sparkles in it. You can use it if you want. It came with one of my Barbie dolls.”

“Barbies?” Stink echoed, making a face and Astrid scowled at him.

“I slept in some spider webs,” Olivia observed, running her fingers through her hair.

Astrid was more than happy to convince the other girl to take a bath and then Stink, taking the free time alone with the other little girl as an opportunity to dress her up, a living doll that she had in pinks and purples with the jeweled sandals that were still too big for her.

“Such pretty hair,” Astrid sang as she brushed Olivia’s long blonde locks.

*******

Today was the perfect day for a tea party and Astrid had made sure to wash out her plastic tea service the night before. She loved tea parties, but before she had friends living in the attic, she never had anyone to play with.

At the moment her two friends were secreted away in her playhouse, waiting for her to return with their supplies for their tea party. She was in the back porches garden, inspected the little patch of strawberries, but they were still too green to be plucked. She sighed, somewhat disappointed she wouldn’t be able to make the nice desserts for her friends, but soon felt her mood change when she spotted one of the branches from the next door neighbor’s tree caught up one her side of the backyard fence. Her neighbor had been pruning the tree’s branches—the ‘you tree’—and there were the small pink berries she often spotted the birds eating. She quickly knocked the branch down and harvested a handful of the pink berries, gleefully stuffing them in her pockets. They were much prettier than strawberries—they looked like pieces of candy!

She returned to kitchen to get the water for her teapot, humming to herself as she watched the water fill up in the mauve plastic.

“Hi, baby. What are you up to?”

Astrid jerked around to see her mama standing in the doorway, looking quite pale, her lavender bathrobe wrapped tightly around her.

“Um, a tea party,” she said, trying to look as though she hadn’t been caught in the middle of something; she  _really_  didn’t want her friends taken away.

But her mama just smiled and moved over to the counter next to her. “Oh. Do you want a little sugar for your tea?”

“Yes, please.” She watched her mama spoon two small spoonfuls of sugar inside and she smiled. “Thank you.”

Her mama shuffled over to the pantry and pulled out the last of the Oreos, putting them in a plastic bag so she could carry them along with the teapot. “Mama’s going to go lay down again. Behave, okay baby?”

“Okay!” Astrid sang as she skipped out of the back door.

“What took you so long?” Stink asked once she entered the playhouse.

“My mama came downstairs.” Astrid held out the bag of Oreos and pulled the berries she’d found out of her pockets. “Olivia, would you like to help me make the teacakes?”

“These are Oreos,” the boy said snidely.

Astrid ignored him and with a practiced hand, demonstrated to Olivia how to make a teacake. “Like this: you take off the top (you can eat that if you want) and then you put these berries on top! See? A teacake like princesses have!”

“What kind of berries are these?” Olivia asked curiously as she studied the small pink globes.

Astrid shrugged, already having made six little teacakes. “I dunno. They came off the neighbor’s tree.”

Stink made a face. “Ew, I don’t want to eat your smelly tree berries!”

"Shut up, Stink. They smell good," she snapped.

"They do, Peter." Olivia took a tentative bite and then smiled reassuringly at him. "And they taste good, too."

Astrid smiled, presenting the tray with a dozen little Oreo teacakes. "Is anyone hungry?"

Olivia and Stink lunged for the sweets, devouring them two and three at a time.

"It's a tea party! Use your manners!" Astrid cried out, horrified her desserts were being manhandled.

The teacakes all gone, Astrid ate a few of the berries by themselves, grimacing at the bitter seeds. But she remembered her manners as hostess and quickly offered put the rest of them on her empty teacake plate so that her guests might enjoy them as well.

“Do you want tea, Livvy?” she asked.

“I’ve never had tea,” Olivia said nervously.

“It’s okay. It’s not really tea. It’s sugar water,” Astrid confessed as she poured some into each of their teacups.

“The seeds don’t taste so good when you chew them,” Peter observed as he took one of the berries off the plate.

“The sweet covers most of it,” Olivia said, eating one of the black cookie tops along with one of the berries. “These are really nice.”

“Good!” Astrid chirped, delighted her little party was going quite nicely.

The three shyly socialised—Astrid playing a very successful lawyer, Peter a bookseller, and Olivia as herself, because she couldn’t quite grasp the concept of make-believe. It wasn’t long before the sugar water ran out and Astrid grabbed the teapot, announcing,

"I'll get more tea!"

Out of the playhouse and humming ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ she carried her mauve teapot, wondering if she ought grab some more snacks for them to enjoy when she stumbled slightly, her plastic teapot falling from her hands. She leaned forward to pick it up and lost her balance, landing on her left knee. She reached out for the teapot and collapsed. Her whole body felt funny, tingly, like how it felt when she had bumped her funny bone last week. And she was cold, just like when she had jumped into the park pool on that one really hot day…

Gene came barreling out the doggy door, barking at her, licking at her hand. Her head lay in the lawn, there... the stalks of grass, the slender leaves a deep and brilliant green that faded into black...

*******

Peter watched as Olivia's fingers lost their grip on the plastic teacup, the water spilling on the plastic table.

"Are you okay?" he asked, one of his little eyebrows lifting up in curiosity.

Olivia fell face first into the plate of berries, sending the little pink globes flying through the air. Peter grabbed her, feeling that her chest wasn’t moving—she wasn’t breathing! Quickly he pulled her from her chair as he stumbled back against the wall of the little house. She fell backward across his lap as he panted—her eyes were wide open and looked up at the roof blankly, lips parted slightly as her head balanced on his shoulder.

“Are you okay?” he whispered, his voice trembling as his chubby little arms held her tight him.

He knew she wasn’t.

*******

“Terrible. Terrible,” the coroner said as he zipped the third white body bag on the gurney, waving for the EMTs to wheel the little corpse away.

“I’ve seen the birds eating them before—I never thought to warn her about them!” Mrs Farnsworth sobbed, wrapping her bathrobe tighter around her as the police officer stood next to her, trying to offer some reassurance.

“Birds don’t get sick from the yew berry’s seed because they swallow it whole. Your daughter obviously chewed them,” the officer said gently, pointing to the tree branch on the ground next to the fence.

“And the other two children?” Mrs Farnsworth sniffled, watching the two other body bags getting loaded into an ambulance near the front yard.

“It looks like they belonged to the children pound from their tags, but we’ll still have to contact them first just to make sure.”

The teapot lay forgotten in the grass.

 


End file.
